Normally, these year-in-TV columns are a breezy, easy write–a plea for good shows buried somewhere in an embittered litany of bad ones. In recent years, it has felt as though the proliferation of channels and choices has given us only more of the wretched and less of the watchable; satellite…
In time, 2001 might well be remembered as the year of the overhyped and undercooked, the year storybook wizards cast spells to eradicate critical good judgment, the year from which there was so much detritus to choose that much of the good stuff makes a best-of list only by default…
Got a New Year’s resolution to get out a little more in 2002? Here’s your chance to get a hefty dose of schmoozing, courtesy of ArtLink’s monthly First Fridays. The year’s inaugural event will showcase about 30 downtown Phoenix galleries for a roving night of art and adventure.ArtLink insiders recommend…
When he first auditioned for Any Given Sunday director Oliver Stone to play quarterback Willie Beamen, an embittered bench-warmer prone to fits of vomiting before each snap, Jamie Foxx was sure he’d blown it. Stone, as subtle as an ice pick to the cornea, said as much–loud enough so Foxx,…
Appropriately, A Beautiful Mind does not offer a literal translation of the life of John Forbes Nash Jr., the mathematician whose work on game theories won him a Nobel prize in 1994. The film leaves out significant events, people and places; it amalgamates central figures, disguises prominent locations and hides…
College football’s bowl days are here, those glorious excuses to sit on your ass in front of the tube and drink beer through game after game after game. But since you’re in the Valley of the Sun, you can get off your duff and go catch a bowl game firsthand…
New Year’s Eve will find some 150,000 revelers packed cheek-by-jowl along Mill Avenue and environs at the Tempe Tostitos Fiesta Bowl Block Party. Here are the Top 10 reasons to go.No. 10: It’s big — the “block” covers about 4 million square feet of downtown Tempe and Tempe Beach Park…
David Salo’s colleagues and classmates at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have absolutely no idea how he spends his free time. It’s not that the 32-year-old linguistics grad student is ashamed of his hobby (or obsession), which has occupied him for some 26 years. They simply cannot be bothered with it…
Since the horrors of dominator culture — destruction, devastation, dumb-assness — do not appear to be receding of their own accord, there’s great poignancy to the new cinematic adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. The film succeeds as massive, astonishing entertainment; enthralling…
Arizona Jewish Theatre Company’s production of Play It Again, Sam opens Saturday, December 22, at The Playhouse on the Park, in the Viad Corporate Center at 1850 North Central. Shows are at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays, through January 6. Tickets are $25-$27, with $7 student rush tickets available 30 minutes before curtain. Call 602-264-0402 for more information.
If you’re dreaming of a white Christmas in Phoenix, maybe you’d better hit the snooze button. But if a bright Christmas will make up for any unfulfilled fantasies about precipitation, there are plenty of local light shows to give you a jolly holiday glow. Offering Yuletide eye candy and more…
It is December 5, the day AOL Time Warner-owned DC Comics has been anxiously awaiting for almost 15 years–the day writer-illustrator Frank Miller once more dons cape and cowl to resurrect the Dark Knight, his fiercely rendered vision of an obscenely obsessed middle-aged Batman. Today, stores will finally open their…
Lest I be mistaken for a holiday-hating Scrooge, I’ll open by mentioning that I’m writing this theater review surrounded by Christmas trees — three of them, all mine, and each trimmed to sagging by myself and my beloved, while we drank eggnog and ate wreath-shaped cookies and listened to The…
Beneath the hazy, mystifying layers of Vanilla Sky lies a remarkable Tom Cruise performance — one that, to a large extent, takes place beneath a makeup artist’s piled-on scars and a costumer’s blank “prosthetic” mask. As David Aames, hipster publisher of Maxim-like magazines, Cruise plays a lothario so vain he…
It took five men to concoct the hackneyed plot and conceive the brainless jokes that constitute Not Another Teen Movie, meaning there are five men in Los Angeles right now still trying to wash that stink off their soft, idle hands. Five men — five men, the very thought boggles…
The curiosity of the human animal is such that, put face-to-face with an artist and a work of art, we are tempted to pluck at each thread that joins the two, searching for the “truth” of the work, and the artist. While the work cannot, on some elemental level, be…
The look on the face of Homer “The Rock” Moore as he pounds his fists and elbows in vicious combinations against a trainer’s gloves is pure intensity, wide-eyed and emotionless, in stark contrast to the homicidal punishment his 205-pound frame is unleashing. Moore is at Brausa Academy, preparing for his…
“Mr. Human Rights,” they once called him, and though his was never the most famous name on the bill–that was Bono or Bruce Springsteen, Sting or Peter Gabriel–as the organizer of the Conspiracy of Hope concerts in 1986 and the Human Rights Now! world tour two years later, Jack Healey…
My friend Paul is, among other things, a devoted Titanic enthusiast. While other little boys were playing kickball, Paul was playing “Capsize,” a game he’d invented about being trapped on a sinking luxury liner. As a teen, he spent his milk money on membership in the Titanic Historical Society; today,…
Some weeks my job is less about offering opinions about theater than it is about dodging Neil Simon comedies. This week I failed to completely avoid my least favorite playwright, because the only shows opening here last Friday were both written by Simon. I considered attending Stagebrush Theatre’s production of…
